Gardenside Confessions
by Eliza4892
Summary: They say all you have on a deserted island is time. Yet here time seems to be running out.


She practically begs Sun to let her help with the garden. Kate can't sit still and she can't be here with them (Jack, Sawyer, one giving her too much space, the other not enough). There's no more rescue missions to go on and nothing else to do around camp but think. She doesn't want to think. She doesn't want to admit that she's managed to make her own existence here an absolute emotional hell.

Here, in the garden Sun started back when Kate still bothered to tell lies about going to Bali instead of going to jail, when they were both still lying to everyone (themselves, even) about who they were, she can breathe. She doesn't have to think about either man because they're not everywhere around her, and Sawyer's not putting up that front that he thinks she can't see through, and she's not watching Jack and Juliet and wondering if she ever really knew him at all. There's just the smell of dirt and ripened fruit, and the only sounds to be heard for half a mile are those of the birds and Sun's soft-spoken voice that she's missed. She's been gone from this place for too long.

Sun is easy to be around. Kate learned that long ago. She's interested without being intrusive, and she can sense Kate's moods and act accordingly. She knows when Kate doesn't want to talk, when all she wants to do is run but can't because she's got nowhere to go but the ocean, so she'll just have to settle for this. Sun's the first real friend she's had since she started running.

"I'm just restless." Kate tells her, smoothing the soil over the last seed in the freshly planted row. "Can't seem to sit still."

Sun nods.

"It's like you'd think I'd be glad to be back. To not have a reason to go gallivanting around the jungle." She pauses, still waiting for Sun to cut in, but she doesn't, just continues gathering some of the leaves off this one plant whose function she doesn't remember. It helps some ailment, she just could never keep track. "But being on the beach, having everyone act like this is normal…it's not normal. It's like there's something missing."

Either her eyes are playing tricks on her or Sun just kind of half-smiled at that, in that way like she's in on some joke that Kate isn't.

"How come I'm the one doing all the talking?" Kate finally asks, and Sun glances up, briefly, before returning her attention to the leaves.

"I'm a better listener," Sun replies, and Kate kind of frowns because she knows that's not really it. "And you don't have to try and make excuses for why you're here. I enjoy the company."

It's Kate who smiles then.

---

"Is something bothering you?" Kate asks, looking at Sun across the garden. She doesn't seem like herself, more quiet and withdrawn then she normally is when they're together. Short answers, like she's angry with her for some reason, except her tone says otherwise.

Sun looks up at her, holds her gaze there for a minute, then decides she doesn't want to be looking at her when she says this, and keeps her eyes trained on the dirt underneath her hands. "Juliet told me what happens to pregnant women on this island."

Kate remembers what Juliet told her about pregnant women. That their bodies turn on them. That they all die. It's in the back of her mind every time she trips up and sleeps with Sawyer, after telling herself she wouldn't do this anymore. The ultimate threat.

She's about to act like she doesn't know, she's about to ask Sun to tell her what Juliet said, but Sun catches on too quickly, and looks at her pointedly, softly accusative, "You knew?"

"Yeah," Kate says, knowing it's better to tell now than lie some more and hope she doesn't get caught. "She told us – me and Jack – back when Claire was sick."

"Why didn't you tell me?"

Kate licks her lips, looks away, feeling guilty. "Consider the source. We don't know anything at all about her. She could be lying. She probably is."

"Then why did she know how to fix Claire?" Sun poses the question, knowing Kate has no way of backing up her statements then. It's an undeniable fact. She averted a crisis, when even Jack couldn't, and that earned her some level of trust, or at least camaraderie from them. From some of them anyway.

"Who knows how she did what she did." Kate says to the ground with a small shake of her head. "There was just no sense in telling you unless we knew for sure. You and Jin…I see you together, and this baby gave you hope. We all need a little hope here."

She sees something flash in Sun's eyes, something that resembles fear, maybe devastation, and while Kate knows something is up she also knows enough not to pry just yet.

---

"Water," Kate says, nudging Sun with the now full bottle as she squats down next to her. Sun's mixing up something that, when Kate inhaled the scent of it too deeply when Sun wasn't looking, had made her head feel tingly. She has a feeling that it's meant to kill pain in much the same way heroin would. A worst case scenario type of thing that feels way too much like preparation for something Kate's been sensing in her gut ever since she came back. Something's coming.

Sun takes the bottle, and gives Kate a smile that doesn't reach her eyes. "Thank you," she says quietly, uncapping it to take a sip. It's just after noon; the heat is starting to get to the both of them. Jack was by here earlier, warning them both, especially Sun, to keep hydrated, telling them it was best to go out later, more towards dusk. Despite that, they'd both continued on working.

"You were gone with Juliet for quite awhile yesterday." Kate begins, getting to what she'd been wanting to ask since they'd met up this morning.

"It was an exam," Sun replies, taking the bait. "Jack thought it was a good idea after what she told us about the pregnant women on the island."

Kate fights the urge to remark about Jack's blind trust, instead choosing to ignore it completely and asks, "Did she find anything abnormal?"

"No," Sun tells her, and she'd sound more excited if that was all there was to it.

She waits a few moments for Sun to continue, but she doesn't. "What?"

The other woman flicks her eyes away from Kate. "She did some tests to determine the date of conception. Women who conceive on the island are the ones in danger, while the ones who were already pregnant usually carried to term. And she says that she is nearly one hundred percent sure that I conceived a month before the crash."

"That's good, right? I mean, that means you'll be fine." Kate didn't understand why her friend remained so tense in spite of what appeared to be good news. She would be relieved in the same position.

"I haven't always been faithful." Sun says, ashamedly. "I was with another man up until a month before the crash. His name was Jae-Lee, I meet him before I knew Jin."

Kate's eyes widen slightly, the revelation surprising. She hadn't thought Sun to be the type to cheat. "And there's no way it's Jin's?"

Sun shook her head solemnly. She so clearly wanted to say there was but was unable. "We'd tried before. The doctor said he isn't able to have children. We thought maybe the island…" she trailed, and Kate knew that she thought the island had fixed Jin, that was what she'd been telling herself up until now, where she was forced to confront the truth. "But he was never around later on, and I was lonely. Jae was an escape; I thought he might even be my future. And then my father found out, and I had to leave him. It wasn't even a week later that he died."

"You're not…" Kate stops, swallowing her words, because it's a stupid question, she should know the answer. But then again, Sun seemed to be full of surprises. "You're not going to tell him are you?"

"No." Sun pauses, her voice turning bitter as she says, "If Juliet is to be believed, I won't make it far enough to have that be a problem."

---

"You've taken to avoiding them both now?" Sun observes, about a week later, after she's had time to digest all this news she's been receiving. Earlier, she had said she would just wait and see what happened. That's all she really could do anyways.

It was pointless to play dumb. It was obvious who Sun meant. "Pretty much. It makes things easier."

Sun watches her for a moment, before she says, "Perhaps you should tell Sawyer that. He's been making a point of letting everyone know that you two are together."

"We're not," Kate cuts in, snappily, and she looks up in apology a second later. "Or we are, but not like that. Like he thinks."

"Did you make that clear to him?"

"What am I supposed to say? I'm just in for the sex, and because I know you're in love with me I also know you'll put up with it." She blushes, the words kind of just spilling out before she really thought them through. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean…it's not even really…" she searches for an explanation, finally settling on, "it's complicated."

"So you're not in love with him?" Sun asks.

Kate's starting to wonder if this is twenty questions. Then again for the past few days all she's been doing is grilling Sun, so she guesses it's about time Sun returns the favor. "Define love. I mean, do I see myself getting off this island and settling down with him in a house with a white picket fence? No. That's not him. That's not me either." She bites her lip, sighing. "He's just every man I've ever been with, and I don't want to be stuck in the same patterns for the rest of my life. I love him – I care for him – but I don't love him the way he wants me to."

Sun rocks back a bit, pulling another weed out of the ground so it doesn't crowd the various herbs. She's meticulous about that kind of thing. Then, she gets up the guts to ask, "And what about Jack?"

"What about him?"

"Do you love him?" Sun clarifies.

Kate falls silent. Again with the loaded questions. Love was too broad of a term she was quickly starting to realize. It was a term people tossed around far too carelessly. Saying you love someone as a friend, as a sibling, as a parent, as a soul mate. They were all different things, different feelings.

But she does love Jack. And it's not in the way she loves Sawyer either. It's something deeper. It's that painful, tugging of her heart, that won't let her stop thinking about him no matter how many times he pushes her away.

Even if she thinks she might have lost him forever.

With a nod of her head, and sadness in her eyes, she tells Sun, "Yeah, I do."

The look on Sun's face tells her she doesn't need any further explanation. She knows just what Kate's saying. She won't ask any more questions.

---

It becomes clear, later on, that waiting is getting them nowhere.

Juliet's been exposed. Both Jack and Sayid have finally agreed on something, and that something is that the Others are most likely planning something. Planning to come for them. There's an odd state of panic just below the surface.

Kate and Sun had to sneak off to get to the garden. Early in the morning. Jack hasn't been letting anyone go anywhere much of late. He's too scared of losing someone. This is the first time they've been in the garden in close to a week and a half.

"We shouldn't be gone too long. We'll never hear the end of it otherwise." Kate tells her, a small voice in her head telling her that at least then Jack will be talking to her for longer than a few seconds. This game of avoidance is really starting to get to her. She misses him.

"I think Jack is being a little too cautious." Sun replies, quietly yet firmly.

Without a second thought, Kate finds herself defending him almost automatically. "He's just trying to protect us."

Sun looks up at her through long lashes. "Then tell me why he lets Sayid and Sawyer go out without a single word, but when you asked him he told you no before you could finish your sentence." Kate glances down at her nails, dirt already starting to find its way underneath them. She's trying to make a point, one that Kate's not entirely comfortable with. "You are just as capable as them."

"I never said he was being realistic," Kate says.

That's when Sun must realize that this passive-aggressive method doesn't work on here, because Kate knows where this is going, and she will not keep talking about this. She wants to be done with this, with them. She doesn't want to think about him. So Sun just goes straight to the point. "He still cares about you…"

"Sun…" Kate trails, pleading with her to stop. Willing her to.

Sun dusts her hands off on the fronts of her pants, and sits just a little straighter. "No, Kate." And she's never heard her friend be so bold, so forceful. It's enough to almost make her smile, to see how far this woman has come since they first landed here. "Because he still cares about you, and you care about him as well. The two of you have been dancing around each other since we crashed, and we've all seen it. You should not just throw that all away for a relationship you don't even want to be in. You have to at least try."

Kate shakes her head, because she has tried. And she's gotten nowhere. She's tried to work her way back into his life, to gain his trust again. Nothing works. "And how do you propose I do that?"

"Tell him how you feel."

"Alright, well, if it's that easy, why don't you tell Jin about the baby? Since it's best to get it all out in the open." Her words are bitter, and they sound foreign to her own ears. She regrets it as soon as she says it, but it's out there, and it's how she feels after all.

She watches the other woman draw back a bit, narrow her eyes just a touch, and press her lips together, bleeding the color from them. Kate's sure she's going to walk away. She crossed a line, and it's not like she can take it back.

Then, strangely, Sun relaxes. She looks away from Kate, but the hostile body language, present for only a few long moments, disappears. "Perhaps you're right. Perhaps I should tell him." Kate glances at her, in surprise at the admittance. "We put things off here. It's been so long, and no one even thinks about rescue anymore. They say all we have is time. We're on a deserted island. But that seems to be the thing we don't have. People here keep dying, and all those promises about tomorrows just fade away."

There's wisdom in the woman's words. It puts things in perspective. She remembers Boone's death. His last words had been 'tell Shannon…'. He'd never finished, and the young blonde had cried over his body for hours. Kate's always subconsciously wondered if those words that never made it past his lips might have been of some consolation to the broken woman.

Time is running out. It always has been. She's just never really realized it until now.

"I'm going to tell him." Kate says, suddenly, her mouth working with her mind.

Sun smiles, nodding, sounding less sure of herself. "And I will tell Jin. Somehow."

Kate lets out a breath, "I'm scared."

"Aren't we all?"


End file.
